Leahy the storyteller

06/16/2007

By Evan Lehmann
Brattleboro Reformer

WASHINGTON -- The Senate storyteller from Vermont has been punched, hunted, kissed and almost murdered.

He's spun tales with six presidents, dueled over ice cream with Castro, and recently called the once-cussing vice president "Dick."

Patrick Leahy is filled with stories -- and he recounts them at a remarkable pace.

Whether overseeing the Judiciary Committee, speaking on the Senate floor, or wending through a choke of reporters in the Capitol, Leahy the storyteller is often revealing the scenes he's witnessed inside Washington's mechanics of politics and power over three decades.

"I'll tell you a story," Leahy said recently, ushering this reporter over for a walking talk from the Capitol to his office building -- a stroll he's been taking since 1975, the same year President Gerald Ford escaped two assassination attempts and the Vietnam War ended.

The scene is the White House last winter.

"Pat, Pat, I gotta talk to you," Vice President Cheney says as he approaches Leahy, the Vermont storyteller recounts.

President Bush is already there. The past animosity between Cheney and Leahy prompts Bush to react to the vice president's approach by uttering, "'Uh, oh,' and takes off," Leahy says in his trademark animated murmur.

Bush's concern is unneeded. Cheney wasn't preparing to swear at Leahy -- that was an earlier Leahy story that caused headlines -- but to thank him for the photos the senator had snapped of the vice president at a previous event.

But the intrigue of the episode stuck with Bush, who asked Leahy, the story goes, "what was that all about?" at an event in March.

Leahy's storytelling probes deeper than offering glimpses into a secretive White House, according to former top aides and friends.

The plainspoken 67-year-old has a knack for trading wonky Washington-speak focusing on policy and data for human stories demonstrating pitfalls, pain and emotion, they say.

"He made the land mine thing happen," recalled Bobby Muller, president of Veterans for America, who easily convinced Leahy in 1992 to champion an export ban on antipersonnel land mines, resulting in early restrictions on that ordnance.

Leahy told and retold a gripping narrative about a teenage boy he met along the border of Nicaragua and Guatemala, a victim of the Sandinista-Contra power struggle. The boy had one leg -- the other having detonated a mine.

"When he would tell the story, he would imagine the story, and have tears coming down his face," Muller said. "One of the things that gave us such an incredible advantage on our work on land mines was how Leahy would talk about it."

The Vermont storyteller, elected to the Senate at age 34, began using narrative tales long ago. He read a book aboard a plane early on that advised public speakers of the six-most riveting words: Let me tell you a story.

As a young prosecutor in Chittenden County, Leahy avoided legal descriptions in trial, emphasizing people and places, he said in an interview.

Not surprisingly, Leahy answered a question about his early storytelling days with, of course, a story.

The scene is the late Montana Sen. Mike Mansfield's Capitol hideaway.

The World War I veteran is majority leader. It's Leahy's first two years in office, and the Vermont freshman is bartender during a break in a contentious debate.

Cigars are being smoked, strategies laid, and tales told. Leahy is listening.

"I'd go home and write down these stories," Leahy recalled. "I loved it."

Leahy was elected in the wake of Watergate.

Since then, he's become one of 11 senators in the chamber's history to cast more than 12,300 votes, has seen the body open its committee hearings to the public, avoided a bomb explosion outside the chamber in 1983 -- but not an assailant's fist some years later -- and was targeted by an anthrax mailer who remains at large.

Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, used two sabbaticals in Leahy's office to research books on Congress.

He said Leahy is one of about five lawmakers who serve as the "institutional memory" of the Senate.

"There's not that many senators who've not only lived through it, but are able to talk about it," said Baker, describing Leahy as having a mental "anecdote Rolodex."

Leahy's been hunted by reporters, kissed by a Vietnamese man whom Leahy lifted into his first wheelchair, and influenced by his father's experiences with ethnic discrimination.

"He uses those stories to help drive his legislative goals," said Luke Albee, Leahy's former chief of staff.

But is the storyteller Leahy a fabulist full of fables, subjectively recounting rich anecdotes through a view that's, say, sympathetic to his legacy in the Senate?

"His enthusiasm is so strong, you forget what the facts are," teased Sen. John Warner, a Virginia Republican who's shared the chamber floor with his northern counterpart since 1979.

"Maybe I'm getting myself in trouble," the white haired hawk added, before affectionately plunging into a known element of Leahy's episodic storytelling: "I can tell you he has a way of repeating his stories. I don't know what's up with his memory situation. But there is some repetition."

A mysterious case of rum left at Leahy's office building after a trip to Cuba corroborates the facts of one story -- and perhaps promoted its repetitive telling.

The scene is Havana.

Dinner with Fidel Castro is lasting late. With each new course, Castro touts its superiority, a claim not objected to by Leahy and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.

Until dessert, when Leahy declares that Vermont's Ben & Jerry's is best.

You know the rest.

Link to article